Utilitarian Review 1/7/12

As our traffic bar graph above shows (click to enlarge), this has been an amazing year for HU. I thought I’d do a quick tour through some of the highlights.

Greatest Hits

There’s no doubt that the highlight of the year was Sean Michael Robinson and Joy DeLyria’s post in which they reimagined the Wire as a Victorian novel. Originally part of our Wire Roundtable, the post unexpectedly became a massive internet meme, picked up by everyone from Harper’s to the Baltimore Sun. It got more than 100,000 hits, and still, more than half a year later, is a fixture in our most popular posts list. A massive chunk of that leap in traffic up there is because of Sean and Joy’s post. I doubt we’ll ever reach those heights again, honestly…which is maybe for the best, as they busted our server.

Sean and Joy also landed a book contract on the strength of the post; the book should be out in a couple of months, I believe. Sean and Joy also had a post about Wuthering Heights, Unicorns, and joys of the publishing process, while Sean (by himself this time) had a nice piece about how being a meme affected his artistic process.

The other major traffic generator this year was Robert Stanley Martin’s International Best Comics Poll. More than 200 cartoonists, academics, critics, and other comics industry folk submitted lists to determine the 10 greatest comics of all time. Robert put an enormous amount of effort into organizing the poll, most visible maybe in the carefully annotated lists for every participant. It was a fantastic project, and HU was very lucky that Robert decided to run it here, and that so many other folks put in their time and energy to make it work.

Another post which drew a lot of attention this year was Nadim Damluji’s discussion of Craig Thompson’s Habibi and Orientalism. The post sparked a long, occasional series of responses, including Nadim’s interview with Thompson.

Finally, this didn’t generate tons of traffic, but one of the things I’m most proud of this year was our Illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable. A whole host of talented cartoonists and artists drew works inspired by Wallace Stevens poems. I couldn’t have been happier with how it turned out.

Kicked to the Curb

As some of you may remember, we started out this year as part of Tcj.com. In February, there was a shake up over there and we were fired with two weeks notice. Derik Badman did an amazing job setting up a new space for us, including engineering this site redesign you’re looking at. Thanks also to Edie Fake for creating our awesome oozy banner.

I talked about our year at tcj.com here, and commented on the pros and cons of their changed direction here. Finally, Mike Hunter eulogized the end of the TCJ message board.

More! More! More!

Here’s a sample of some other memorable moments from throughout the year.

Richard Cook on the Marvel Swimsuit issue.

Ng Suat Tong’s juried selection of theBest Online Comics Criticism.

Matt Seneca’s interview of CF.

My interview of Sharon Marcus, focusing on queer theory, lesbian identity and (of course) Wonder Woman.

An unexpected visit by Diamanda Galas, Evil Bitch Fist and Party of One.

An extensive roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec.

Tom Crippen presented a number of galleries of work by the cartoonist and illustrator Robert Binks.

Throughout the year we’ve had a bunch of posts on Twilight, of all things.

Tom Gill with a massive post on Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu and fetuses in the sewer.

Anja Flower on the queer, interspecies allure of Edward Gorey.

Mahendra Singh on Jeffrey Catherine Jones.

My essay on Wonder Woman, superdicks, and Christ.

Yoshimichi Majima and Timothy Finney on questions about the original art sold by Manga Legends,

Kinukitty on Stevie Nicks.

A series of posts on R. Crumb and race, including Domingos Isabelinho’s post on the work ofAlan Dunn.

A roundtable on Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

Qiana Whited on Blues and Comics.

A blog crossover on Cable/Soldier X with Tucker Stone.

Ng Suat Tong Anders Nilson’s Big Questions.

Anne Ishii on Miyazaki and women in the animation industry.

A roundtable on the Drifting Classroom.

A roundtable on Jaime Hernandez and his critics.

Erica Friedman on what’s the big deal about Sailor Moon.

A series of posts by James Romberger on Alex Toth.

A (still-ongoing!) roundtable organized by Caroline Small on Godard. This included the amazing shot-by-shot remake of Breathless by Warren Craghead.

And, of course, an occasional series of downloadable music mixes.

Utilitarian Future

We’re going to finish up the Godard roundtable, I know; there’s been agitation for a Jaime Hernandez roundtable; we may have some sort of celebration in September of our 5-year anniversary (presuming we make it that far!) — and beyond that, we’ll see. Thanks to all our writers, commenters, and readers for making 2011 a great year at HU. We’ll see you tomorrow to get started on 2012!

Utilitarian Review 12/31/11

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

For our Featured Archive post, Richard Cook provides a gallery of comic book santas.

Richard Cook on Tron Legacy and our beneficent economic overlords.

Me on Grant Morrison’s Batmen and the endless iteration of our pop crap souls.

Me on Wonder Woman #25 and Habibi.

Eddie Campbell (from comments) on Persepolis and Habibi.

A download of music from women singers around the world.

Tom Crippen with a gallery of work by cartoonist and illustrator Robert Binks.
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Utilitarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I review a rereleased album by the Nigerian Lijadu Sisters.

Also on Splice, I argue that Ron Paul’s racism doesn’t necessarily lose him my vote since his opponents are either actual or wannabe war criminals and torturers.

Other Links

Monika Bartyzel on the sexualization of Lisbeth in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Dan Kois on Broadcast News.

Ethan Heitner with a comic interview with a Palestinian artist and activist.

Laura Hudson with a great review of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #26

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

As I’ve mentioned, the last few issues of the Marston/Peter run have been tough going. Marston was, at this point in the series, very unfortunately dead, and it seems likely that at least some of the scripts were being ghosted. In any case, quality fell off something fierce.

I’m pleased to say that things have picked up somewhat with #26, though. The stories are not especially ambitious, but they do seem to be written by Marston, in all his loopy, kinky glory. Giant women enslaving their menfolk?

Check. Insane tiger-lady using pressure points to control men’s wills?

Yes. Evil treacherous green men attacking virtuous intergalactic golden policewomen?

Yay!
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So since Marston’s in his bonds and all is right with the world, I thought I might try using issue #26 to see if I couldn’t address some of the questions Matthias raises in this post about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Specifically, Matthias argued that critics need to address not only ideological issues, but also aesthetic ones — or, perhaps more accurately, that critics should address ideological issues through aesthetic ones.

Matthias approaches both issues of aesthetics and ideology in Thompson’s work through a metaphor of control. For Matthias, Thompson’s art is unsurprising, slick, and overly pat:

the line is rather mechanical, incapable of surprising us – every stroke is in its place, and we know where it is headed.

Matthias adds:

Everything is the same graceful brushstroke, as if that were the main point. The effect is strangely antiseptic in a work that concerns itself so intently with filth and pollution — its mountains of garbage seem designed to wow us more than anything else.

So above is Thompson’s mound of garbage. Let’s look, in contrast, at an image of Harry Peter’s from Wonder Woman #26.

To start with maybe the most obvious differences, Thompson’s mound of garbage is (as Matthias notes) much more carefully, and even classically composed than Peter’s scene of quasi-classically dressed women. Thompson makes careful use of negative space; the area in front of the garbage dump is blank, setting off the brick-a-brack. The grouping of man, woman, and boat is placed up to one side, isolating it dramatically. The arrangement comes across as painterly, or perhaps as dramatically awe-inspiring in the manner of Doré. The image seems frozen or posed; a dramatic landscape to be placed on a wall and (as Matthias says) admired.

Peter’s illustration is also stiff and still — the guards stand straight off to the side; Wonder Woman stands straight in the center, and the two giants also seem oddly rigid. However, the stiffness here isn’t painterly or dramatic; it’s awkward. The figures aren’t grouped to take advantage of negative space; instead, their just dropped against the disturbing pale green background. They end up looking like paper dolls; you almost want to get a scissors and cut them out. Where Thompson’s drawing seems elaborately finished, sufficient unto itself, Peter’s beckons you to take part — not least by presenting Wonder Woman herself as a puppet, literally manipulated by a cord attached to her neck.

These differences carry over to the use of line. As Matthias says, Thompson’s inking is so sure as to be almost diagrammatic, most noticeably in his calligraphy.

The image above is for the most part bilaterally symmetrical, and the repetition of shapes is careful and more than a little cold. This is miles away from the tradition of Japanese calligraphy, where imperfection — the sign of the writer’s hand — is such a central part of the aesthetic.

Zen Circle by Tanchu Tarayama

Peter is certainly capable of graceful lines (check out the eyebrows.)

But, as with the composition, he’s not afraid of awkwardness either. The clunky wire connecting the box to Wonder Woman’s neck manages to look so stiff and odd in part because Peter doesn’t keep the two lines forming it an even distance from each other; they bulge out and come together to make an organic metalness. Peter also uses inky blots and daubs almost at random. The patterns on the chief giant’s winged boots, for example, are so joyously messy that they almost fail to parse as feathers. Similarly, the motion lines by the ax are thick and juicy enough that the giant seems ready to grab them. If Thompson’s line is precise, creating a definite, calibrated world, Peter’s line is has a bulbous, erratic grace, which constantly threatening to pull his figures down into their constituent globs.
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I (still!) haven’t read Habibi, so I’m tentative about making wide statements about how the linework might relate to Thompson’s narrative themes and vice versa. So I’ll piggy back on Matthias’ insights, and point out some possible connections that he doesn’t quite tease out. For example, this from Matthias is suggestive:

In Habibi, this unease is primarily located in the treatment of sexual anxiety and transgression, which borders on the obsessive and even the sadistic. It is almost as if Thompson enjoys torturing his characters, especially through sexual humiliation, in a way that suggests meaning beyond the narrative itself.

Matthias seems to see the obsessive sexual transgression as outside of, or opposed to the neatness of the surface…but in fact, I wonder if they’re not all of a piece. As anyone knows who has tried to read de Sade, sadism is really boring. It’s repetitive and obsessive and overly organized; counting whip strokes with the same kind of regular blandness with which Thompson makes pen strokes. Moreover, the very composedness of the junk pile, recalls Laura Mulvey’s comments about the pictorial autonomy of Hollywood cinema:

But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.

If Orientalism is a voyeuristic phantasy, Thompson’s self-sufficient style might be seen as a means to control and regiment that fantasy — a way to keep everything in its place.

Harry Peter’s art, on the other hand, is much less successful at creating an illusion of containment. Wonder Woman’s look over her shoulder seems deliberately to break the plane of the image just as the figures seem cut loose, floating in front of their own background. Power and hierarchy break apart into knowing glances and wiggling blobs; are these lines pretending to be women, or women pretending to be Peter’s? It all seems staged, not as an image for singular consumption, but as a dress up play in which each viewer and each line is invited to assist in limning each role. In its stiff, awkward way, Peter’s style embraces polymorphous perversion. His line encourages not (or not just) scopophilia, but a plethora of interrupted, indeterminate, pleasures of position and pretense. Aesthetically or ideologically, the line draws you in not as master, but as subject.
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Update: The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

Alien Submission

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

This is part of a series of posts on empowerment
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Lilith, the heroine of Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn, is about as thoroughly disempowered as a woman can plausibly be. When we meet her, she has just awoken after a nuclear holocaust to find herself a prisoner on (as we eventually learn) an alien spaceship. Her captives do not even initially provide her with clothes; when she refuses to speak to them, they simply ignore her until she goes insane (they fix her, luckily, so the book can go on). When she does finally meet a tentacled alien, she has a phobic reaction so severe that she can barely stand to be in the same room with it. The alien, though, refuses to leave, demanding that she accommodate herself to it with a blank insistence that smacks of both condescension and sadism.

Eventually, Lilith learns that the aliens (the Oankali) are capable of advanced genetic manipulation, and have rescued the few remaining earthlings in order to mate with them. Despite her protests, Lilith is trained to prepare other human beings to meet the Oankali. She does, and eventually, as a reward, the Oankali impregnate her without her consent. Nikanj, the creature who impregnated her, tells her that her words said she didn’t want a child, but her heart said something else; in short, it gave her a baby for her own good. Lillith is angry at first, but eventually she accepts that Nikanj was right; she really did want a child, just as it said. Over the course of the three book series, Lilith bears something like a dozen or more alien babies. Thus one of the names of the trilogy, Lilith’s Brood.

And if you thought that tale of being changed into a baby factory against your will was bad, just wait till the second book. In”Adulthood Rites,” the entire plot hinges on the evil of birth control. Furthermore, we learn that the so-called Human Contradiction is most fully embodied in males. Thus, effectively, men are more human than women. Dave Sim couldn’t have summarized misogyny any more clearly than that.

Butler isn’t a misogynist though. She’s a feminist. So what on earth (as it were) does she think she’s doing?

Things may become a little clearer if we go back and define the “human contradiction” that males appear to embody more fully than woman. This “human contradiction” is hierarchy and intelligence. According to Butler-via-the-Oankali, humans are an exceedingly intelligent species, but because they are hierarchical, their intelligence leads them inevitably to murder each other. Thus, the nuclear apocalypse is not an accident; it’s the inevitable effect of humanity’s genetic structure. Men are more human than women in that they are more hierarchical, and therefore more fully in tune with the inevitable human destiny of self-destruction. As Nikanj says to Lilith, “A male who’s Human enough to be born to a Human female could be a danger to us all.” Men, being men, are too human and too deadly.

In this context, Lilith’s disempowerment takes on a different inflection. After all, in this narrative, humans tried empowerment. They built powerful bombs and more powerful bombs, and finally they all killed each other. Clearly, it’s time to try something else.

The thing Lilith tries is adaptation — or, less charitably, submission. The Oankali choose to wake Lilith and work with her specifically because she is so adaptable. Butler never says this in so many words, but the implication is that because Lilith is a woman and an African-American — because she was marginal in terms of her culture on earth — she is more able to accept radical changes to that culture. She was also an anthropologist, accustomed to accepting and processing difference. Even given her background, though, Lilith has a remarkable talent for changing and adapting to those she meets. She is unique, in some sense, not because she stays true to herself, but because, like Bella in Twilight — or, indeed, like any mother — she is willing to be transformed by those she loves.

On the other hand, those who insist on staying true to themselves have a terrible time of it in Butler’s world. The Oankali, as I said, are genetic engineers. They are also the ultimate traders — and what they trade is their being. The Oankali travel from star to star, seeking other living creatures with whom to combine their genetic material. The perfect capitalists, they remain Oankali through constant change, losing their very genetic identity in the pleasurable rush of barter.

The pleasure is literal. The Oankali have three genders; male, female, and ooloi. The third, neuter sex combines genetic material from the other two, and from their trading partners, to produce a new life form. The male and female do not have intercourse; instead, the ooloi plugs directly into their nervous systems, and manipulates their genetic material….as well as their pleasure centers.

Nikanj focused on the intensity of their attraction, their union. It left Lilith no other sensation. It seemed, itself, to vanish. She sensed only Joseph, felt that he was aware only of her.

Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them timeless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.

Afterwards, Joseph, Lilith and Nikanj’s male lover, interrogates Lilith.

“Why do you let them…touch you?”

“To have changes made. The strength, the fast healing — ”

He stopped in front of her, faced her. “Is that all?” he demanded.

She stared at him, seeing the accusation in his eyes, refusing to defend herself. “I liked it,” she said softly. “Didn’t you?”

As this quote mentions in passing, the Oankali actually did empower Lilith; by manipulating her genes, they gave her great strength, the ability to heal quickly, and very long life. She’s a superhero basically, like Buffy or Wonder Woman. But her main power is something she had originally — the ability to accept and submit, to difference and to pleasure.

It’s a power she has not least because she’s a woman. In her book Powers and Submissions, Christian feminist Sarah Coakley argues that Biblically it was women like Mary Magdalene who first saw the risen Christ, and that they had to convince men that what they had seen was true — a dynamic which Thomas Aquinas linked to women’s greater ability to love. Along those lines, male humans, as Joseph demonstrates, are as a group substantially more freaked out by sex with the Oankali than women are. Men who sleep with the Oankali feel that they’re being feminized. They need to be strong and autonomous — so much so that the ooloi who mate with men provide them with the mental illusion that they are able to move during interspecies sex, because they would be disturbed by the reality that the ooloi immobilize them to give them pleasure.

For Butler, then, the human (and especially male) desire for autonomy, dominance, and power is at best a whimsy to be indulged and at worst a deadly disease to be eradicated. There are echoes here of the philosophy of William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.

It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing — love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl? And that’s the point; not even girls want to girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving, as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

The Oankali’s solution is a little different, but the diagnosis is similar. Men (and women too) must learn that violence and empowerment are less powerful than love, peace,and tenderness. The Oankali need to teach men (and women) to submit to love and the loss of self. If men (and women) do not learn the strength of selflessness and submission, they will be destroyed.

This is, in fact, precisely the choice that the aliens give human beings. If they are willing to adapt and submit, they can breed with the Oankali, and their children will be born with tentacles and travel through space. If they are not willing to adapt and submit, then they will have no children at all. The Oankali sterilize all those who refuse to take Oankali mates. The humans will live out exceedingly extended, sterile lifespans, and finally die off. At that point, the Oankali’s living ships will consume everything living on the earth as fuel and sustenance for the long space voyage, and the Oankali/human children will leave earth forever.

This seems excessively cruel; a brutal eugenic blackmail. But Butler explains repeatedly that the Oankali are not in fact trying to force humans to breed with them against their will. Rather, the Oankali sterilize humans because they know that if they don’t sterilize humans, humans will kill themselves off. The genetic contradiction, hierarchy and intelligence, is an inevitable death sentence. Allowing humans to breed means creating a messy, extended genocide rather than a quick, relatively painless one. The Oankali’s logic is, undoubtedly deliberately, the logic of abortion — babies who would be unhappy shouldn’t be born.

The Oankali eventually reverse their decision; Akin, Lilith’s first male Oankali/human son, convinces his people to let the humans breed true on Mars. The Oankali still believe that humans will destroy themselves, but Akin insists that they should be allowed to go on; to make their own choice about how they and their children will die if they cannot choose to live. Even if the imperial conquerors bring love, long life, and peace, the conquered should have the right to cling to their benighted folkways…on a reservation, since their home has been stripped for parts.

Butler’s perfectly aware of the bitter irony there, just as Lilith is aware of the bitterness of her own submission. Though she loves her alien family — her ooloi, her male husband, her female Oankali mate, her male Oankali mate, and her ever-increasing brood — she never fully reconciles to having (as she sees it, with some justification) betrayed humankind. Despite her adaptability, her submission still leaves her feeling co-opted, manipulated, and disempowered.

Though that’s not all she’s left feeling, obviously. Butler doesn’t denigrate empowerment; she clearly believes that women (and men too) should be able to make their own choices, even if those choices include embracing traditional family structures as the Mars colonists do. Lilith herself, for all her adaptability, is hardly weak. On the contrary, she’s intelligent, determined, courageous, and resourceful. Given the task of training other humans to return to a wild and primitive earth, she works hard to give her charges the skills they need without letting them revert to savagery. Similarly, she tries to balance the humans’ need for the Oankali in the short term with the ultimate imperative to escape. Lilith isn’t always, or even often, successful, but she’s always thinking, and in the face of an impossible situation she keeps her goals clearly before her, and works towards them to the best of her ability. It’s hard to know what more one could ask of a hero than that.

But though she acknowledges the importance of empowerment, Butler clearly also hopes for something beyond the hierarchical ideals of strength and autonomy and victory. Indeed, for Butler and for Lilith, one could argue that the courage comes out of the adaptability; that the power comes from the submission. Feminist theologian Sarah Coakley (mentioned above) seems to argue for this point as well, when she argues that from passive spiritual contemplation should come not just “Love, joy, peace” but also “personal empowerment, prophetic resistance, courage in the face of oppression, and the destruction of false idolatry.”

This is worked through by Butler perhaps most clearly in the final book in the series, Imago. The central character and narrator of this volume is Jodahs, Lilith’s first ooloi child. Jodahs has superstrength, superhearing, superhealing, and can shapeshift at will — but without love, it literally de-evolves and begins to disintegrate.

This is not, however, a weakness — love isn’t kryptonite. On the contrary, lovelessness causes death not because there’s something wrong with Jodahs, but because that’s how the world works. Without love, as Butler’s nuclear catastrophe suggests, you get a holocaust.

If lack of love is death, Jodahs’ beauty, its specialness, is precisely love and empathy; all its powers and abilities are linked to the fact that it is a creature made to minister to humans. Butler emphasizes repeatedly that Jodahs needs — indeed hungers after — the experience of healing others of their wounds and genetic defects. This healing is accomplished through sex; by giving pleasure. Thus, Jodahs must seduce, love, mate, and heal or else die.

Jodahs’ superpowers, then, are dependent on its being dependent. This is especially so since those powers come not from the aliens, but from humans — and particularly from human weakness. The Oankali wanted to mate with humans because humans get cancer; they were especially interested in Lilith because she had a strong genetic predisposition to the disease. It’s the rapid cell growth of cancer that taught the Oankali to heal and shape-change; it’s Lilith’s genetic weakness that gives her ooloi child its fantastic abilities. In both its life-threatening need for others and in the genetic basis of its abilities, Jodahs can be seen as an answer to the question posed by Coakley:

what…if true divine ’empowerment’ occurs most unimpededly in the context of a special form of human ‘vulnerability?’

Coakley asks this question specifically in the light of the Christ of Philippians 2.5-11,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow…

In this duality of power and weakness, humility and exaltation, there’s a pretty clear parallel with Butler’s miracle-working human/alien, superhero/dependent, not-man/not-woman, healthy/sick, biracial ooloi. Queerness and kenosis come together in an identity outside identity, a self-effacement through jouissance, the fruits of which are empowerment.

Towards the end of Imago. Jodahs, the narrator, overhears a conversation between its lover, Jesusa, and its mother, Lilith. Jesusa is trying to decide whether to become Jodahs’ life partner. So she asks Lilith how she ever reconciled herself to alien sex.

“I’m afraid. This is all so different… How did you ever…? I mean…with Nikanj…. How did you decide?

My mother said nothing at all.

“You didn’t have a choice, did you?”

“I did, oh, yes. I chose to live.”

“That’s no choice. That’s just going on, letting yourself be carried along by whatever happens.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said.”

Choice, life, sex, and motherhood — it’s hard to believe that Butler isn’t deliberately glancing at the abortion debate here. I don’t think the message is “pro-life”, precisely — especially since the whole debate is in the context of genetically creating tentacled human hybrids through complicated five-way intercourse with aliens, which is not exactly a stance that the Pope would endorse. Still, Butler does seem to be taking a dig at the way that pro-choice can sometimes assume (as with various critiques of Bella) that a choice can only be a choice when it is an assertion of power, or individuality, or death. Lilith didn’t choose love, but she chose to submit to it. Because of that, Jesusa, almost despite herself, turns to Lilith for wisdom and strength. So, too, do the Oankali depend upon her to bear us towards the future.

DWYCK: Open Sesame

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Matthias Wivel

The critical reception of Craig Thompson’s major new book Habibi has been somewhat dismaying. Sometimes, and — I am happy to say — more than occasionally these days, one reads comics criticism of such quality that one is perhaps fooled into believing that the form is finally receiving its due, that we have moved beyond the facile ideological critiques and “story vs. drawing” discussions of yesteryear. But then something like this book comes out and reality bites.

To start with the former issue, parts of the comics intelligentsia seem to be developing an unhealthy obsession with ideological readings of comics. To the extent where a given work is weighed entirely according to an ethical consensus and found wanting because of “problematic” content, most frequently of racist, sexist, or politically offensive nature. Anything else that the work might have to offer tends to be ignored and the notion that something might be good, even great, despite – or even because – of its problems seems inadmissible.

This site has become affected by such thinking in the last year or so to the extent that opening a random article will more likely than not bring the goods. Examples include the endless arguments over Robert Crumb’s racism (in which ‘satire’ has been held up as an inefficacious fig leaf by his defenders), the overblown accusations of sexism directed against Eddie Campbell in our roundtable on his work, the rather one-sided focus on Chester Brown’s choice to depersonalize the prostitutes he depicts in Paying for It, or most recently the discussion of Craig Thompson’s Orientalism in Habibi, which perhaps found its most vicious form in Suat’s review of the book.

I am not necessarily denying that the works in question, or indeed comics history more broadly, are haunted by such issues, nor am I arguing against choosing them as an avenue of criticism — Nadim Damluji’s examination of Habibi is a good example of a considerate approach, while Noah’s obliteration of certain recent DC books offers righteous polemic. The problem, rather, is that such criticism is often informed by a kind of ideological Puritanism that has gained traction in our current culture of taking offense — a Puritanism often blind to aesthetic quality, resistant to uncomfortable discourse, and prone to censorious action.

In the case of Habibi, it seems to me facile and unproductive to harp for too long on its sexism and Orientalism. Yes, it offers both and it suffers from it, but why does that have to be the full story? It is simultaneously, and obviously, a book so generous in intent and so voracious of ambition, that such criticism risks coming off as petty and, more importantly, ends up lacking in resonance.

Does Habibi successfully realize its sprawling ambition? No, it is a bit of mess, frankly, almost claustrophobic in its efforts to cram meaning into a formal structure unprepared for it. There is a distinct unease in the work between its conceptual and formal concerns, an attempt to stretch intellectually within a cartoon framework driven by stereotype and concerned with stylistic élan.

As was the case with Thompson’s paragon Will Eisner when he switched to graphic novel mode in the late seventies, Habibi is marked by an insistence on the value of the archetypes of traditional cartooning as a vehicle for the communication of sophisticated ideas. But where Eisner was suggesting untapped potential, Thompson’s cartooning is retrospective, barely transcending pastiche; where Eisner was concerned with paring down his visual storytelling to eliminate the kind of stylistic excess he had practiced in his classic Spirit strips, Thompson has his cake and wants to eat it too, letting his line run away with the narrative; most importantly however, Eisner’s mature cartooning, for all its faults, is animated by a genuine, mostly unpretentious effort to communicate truthfully, whereas with Thompson, whatever earnestness motivated him, the work smothered in conceptual intent.

Which brings me to the other issue I have with the critical reception of Habibi, and comics in general: the lack of sensitivity to how the visuals are integrally determinant of the work. Critics tend not to look beyond the surface qualities of the drawing in comics, and then proceed to discuss whatever conceptual issues are at stake without devoting much attention to how those issues are manifested visually. Even a cursory examination of the reviews published so far of Habibi should demonstrate this. Only a few have been entirely positive and several have been strongly negative in the conceptual assessment of the book and its ‘writing,’ but the majority of the reviewers have nevertheless taken time to commend the ‘art.’

Despite his strong misgivings, Damluji praises Thompson’s “stunning artwork,” and Fatemeh Fakhraie — while stating that she has no choice but to hate the book — “admits” that it is “beautifully drawn,” but does not engage that part of her experience much further. In their ambivalent takes at the Comics Journal Chris Mautner and Rob Clough both call the cartooning “visually stunning,” while the latter adds “amazingly beautiful” and praises Thompson’s “astonishing” attention to detail; Charles Hatfield, for his part, describes his drawing as “gorgeous” in his equally equivocal assessment in the same place.

In his notes on the book, Sean T. Collins isolates the “art” in one of fifteen bullet points, calling it “lush and lovely on a surface level,” and describing how Thompson’s line “swoops and curves in a fashion he’s explicitly compared to handwriting.” In her critical examination, Tansim Qutait also picks up on this, describing the book as a “…beautifully crafted volume, the ornately decorated pages broadening possibilities for expression in the graphic novel form, as the calligraphy adds an innovative third dimension to the duality of image/text,” without further detailing why or how that would be the case (calligraphy and comics have a long common history). And Michel Faber of The Guardian grandstands against a paper tiger that would have serious comics aesthetes scoff at technical chops, calling the book “an orgy of art for its own sake.”

You cannot argue with taste, but the uniformity of the reaction strikes me as notable. Belying Faber’s theory, comics have generally been and continue to be valued for the technical accomplishment of the art. Thompson is certainly technically accomplished, but these critics seem to overlook that his virtuosity “…is a conventional sort of virtuosity,” here used “in the service of a conventional exoticism,” as Robyn Creswell puts it in his New York Times review of the book. Or as Suat describes it more bluntly, it “…lacks the emotive and stylistic range to capture the pain and suffering he is depicting (almost everything takes on the sensibility of an exercise in virtuosity or an educational diagram).”

Rarely, if ever, does Thompson’s visualizations of his characters support the book’s implicit assertion that it is more than broad melodrama (which it nevertheless is, or could have been, but more on that presently). Wide-eyed Dodola alternates between wonder, despondency, anger, and bliss through the book, as if following Suat’s educational diagram.

The implied complexity of her emotion as she finally proposes a sexual union with her former charge Zam, after many years of separation, is for example undermined entirely by a banal progression from surprise to pity and doubt that simultaneously overstates and flattens the plea for redemption we are supposed to feel. Doughboy Zam’s evasive maneuvers and flitting baby eyes — supposedly a reckoning after years of denying his sexuality to the extent of self-castration — is not any more persuasive.

Secondary characters fare even worse: as several critics have noted, there is nothing to distinguish the sultan beyond central casting, which makes him hard to care about even as a villain. (This is emphatically not the case with the better of Thompson’s nineteenth-century models in Orientalism: compare for instance Delacroix’ chilling portrayal of the tyrant Sardanapalus). And the characterization of walk-on characters, such as the slaves encountered in the market by the fisherman Noah, is often embarrassingly rote, as if Thompson were not even trying.

As previously noted, I suppose he is following Eisner here, but his proposition that these stereotypes — the stuff of kitsch illustration — can carry his ambitious attempt at reconciling typology and psychological realism is unconvincing.

The same goes for his much praised ‘calligraphic’ line. His explication of the word ‘Bismillah’ in the Qu’uran for example is deftly wrought, but his examples sit uncomfortably on the page, one diagram after the next, rather than being woven together harmoniously the way one encounters in good calligraphy. And the line is rather mechanical, incapable of surprising us – every stroke is in its place, and we know where it is headed. Compare Thompson’s other great paragon, Blutch, who for all his faults invariably retains a spontaneity of rendering, a reflexive laxity of control that enables surprise error and insight.

From Blutch's Le Petit Christian (collected 1998)

If this comparison with one of the masters seems unfair, one need look no further than a considerably less facile cartoonist than Thompson, who also just published a big book of comics (Big Questions): Anders Nilsen. Though less secure, often laborious, and marked by errors, his line moves with a nervous jumpiness that makes us wonder what meaning it holds, where it is going.

From Anders Nilsen's Big Questions (collected 2011)

Thompson’s range, similarly, is limited. He uses the same lines to delineate the curve of a sand dune and bodily effluvium.

Everything is the same graceful brushstroke, as if that were the main point. The effect is strangely antiseptic in a work that concerns itself so intently with filth and pollution — its mountains of garbage seem designed to wow us more than anything else.

Also, Thompson’s depiction of the great modern metropolis of Wanatolia is bereft of the grimy presence he describes elsewhere, a lifeless construction, all unpacked from the same box: one might argue that this carries a conceptual point about the barrenness of Empire, but it still fails to evoke the environment our heroes will be moving through for the rest of the chapter. Blandness also requires suggestiveness to be recognized as such.

At the risk of repeating myself, my overarching point about comics criticism here is that if one wishes to criticize Habibi’s writing and subject matter, it seems a missed opportunity not to recognize that the problems identified inhere as much in the visuals as in anything else. Merely to describe the art as ‘beautiful’ and otherwise ignore its importance to the work is ultimately doing Thompson — and more fundamentally the comics form itself — a disservice.

Thompson’s deadening control of line and resort to stereotype are part and parcel of the deliberation he brings to his writing and conceptual presentation: everything is there for a reason and he makes sure we know it, even if we sometimes wonder whether that reason is particularly well digested. And in a way you cannot but admire Thompson for his ambition and efforts — Habibi is a smorgasbord of ideas, generously laid out for the reader by a highly talented cartoonist whose enthusiasm is certainly infectious but also, and ultimately, smothering.

Where the work really shines for me is in the passages marked less by overt intent and more by instinct, which was also the case in his previous, autobiographical book, Blankets, in which the uneasy and tentative, if also undeveloped, treatment of the author’s relationship with his brother was by far the most compelling aspect of the story. In Habibi, this unease is primarily located in the treatment of sexual anxiety and transgression, which borders on the obsessive and even the sadistic. It is almost as if Thompson enjoys torturing his characters, especially through sexual humiliation, in a way that suggests meaning beyond the narrative itself.

In Blankets the same themes were treated much more timidly; here, there is a fascinating excess on display. This ties in to the very masculine display of Thompson’s brushwork — executed in what he has described as the “virile” tradition of Blutch and other European cartoonists, from Edmond Baudoin to Christophe Blain (more on that here) — and for which he has employed the tired metaphor of the mark as divine seed more than once, including at the beginning of Habibi. Importantly, it also energizes nervously Thompson’s patently male gaze. A more mature exploration of this tension — a tension fully worthy of his talent and aspiration — would seem to me a fruitful direction for his future work.
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Editor’s Note: This is part of an occasional roundtable on Orientalism and Habibi.

Update by Noah: I try to respond to some of Matthias’ points here.

Cinderella, Feminist, Part 2

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

The Godard Roundtable will pick up later today, but I thought I’d sneak this post in since we have a little space.
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Since I wrote my last post on the movie Ella, Enchanted, I reread Gail Carson Levine’s book Ella Enchanted, on which the movie is based.

The book is very different…and I’d say a good bit better. Ella wins the prince over not because she’s spunky, but because she’s smart and funny — and Levine is a good enough writer to endow her creation with actual wit. The love story is a lot more convincing too; the book lets it develop over months rather than over weeks.

The story is also much darker. In the film the obedience is definitely shown to be a curse…but it’s also fun, and funny (Ella grabbing her own tongue when told to hold her tongue; Ella hopping away when told to hop to it.) And sometimes the curse is actually even something like a blessing. Ella is, for example, magically able to obey commands to become a fighter and beat up ogres early in the movie; she’s able to become a talented singer when told to be so.

In contrast, in the book, the curse confers no magical powers. When Ella is sent to finishing school and told to behave like a lady, she just has to do the painful, grinding work of training herself to act like a lady. The book does a much better job of making you feel the oppression of slavery, not as a painful occasional trick, but as an everyday weight on the spirit.

Another difference is that in the film Ella’s father is distant and flighty, but not actively cruel. As a result, a lot of the movie doesn’t really make sense — why doesn’t Ella tell him about her curse, for example? Why does he marry the repulsive Dame Olga? In the book, though, Ella’s father is actually a grasping, cruel man — not completely evil, perhaps, but certainly caring far more for money than for Ella. This is made especially clear in a painful scene in which her father attempts to marry Ella off to a wealthy, older earl. He sees her as a possession; as chattel. And her obedience forces her to be just that.

The political ramifications of this are interesting. In the film, of course, politics is figured in terms of authoritarianism and revolution. The uncle-on-the-throne is evil and racist, and Ella’s obedience makes her sensitive to the need to treat others justly. In the book, though, the king is a good sort, and there’s no sense of widespread injustice. Instead, the injustice is gendered. It’s in the way Ella’s father treats her as a thing, and in the way that her stepmother and stepsisters treat her as a servant doing traditional woman’s work.

Ella’s escape from the curse in the book follows through on the logic. In the film, the prince asks her to marry him and she frees herself, as if becoming his makes her no one else’s. In the book, though, Ella finds the strength to break the curse by refusing the Prince when he says “marry me”. Ella knows that with her curse, others could use her to betray the Prince; an obedient wife would destroy the kingdom. It’s only when she breaks the curse and gains her independence that she can be a good wife — a person, rather than a chattel.

The book, then, is much more sensitive to patriarchy’s specificity; to the way that fathers and husbands are not just loved ones, but potential oppressors. It’s much less interested, though, in class injustices — Ella never extrapolates from her own servitude to wonder about the conditions of other servants, for example. It seems like you can have narratives about authoritarian regimes (like the Hunger Games) or you can have narratives about patriarchy (which I’d argue is the case with Twilight, where Bella is constantly thwarting Edward’s plans for her) but combining the two seems difficult.

Perhaps that’s because, when you do combine the two, it starts to seem much more difficult for our heroine to win? You can take public authoritarianism seriously or you can take private authoritarianism seriously, but both at once is maybe just a little too much reality for a fairy tale.
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This is part of an occasional series on empowerment.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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